The Beautiful Brain explores the latest findings from the ever-growing field of neuroscience through monthly long-form essays, reviews, galleries, short-form blog posts and more, with particular attention to the dialogue between the arts and sciences.

Noah Hutton reviews The Deconstructive Theatre Project’s recent production of The Orpheus Variations. In its innovative blend of live projection and constantly shifting scenery, the play was a fascinating reflection of the constant stitching-together of human consciousness.

Ben Ehrlich reviews Jonathan Gottschall’s new book, “The Storytelling Animal,” whose main idea is a magical one: we are Homo fictus– fiction fiends– creatures of an imaginative realm called Neverland, “where we ramble in make believe.”

The cold humanists have arrived: a parade of skeptical voices, mostly from the humanities, that has steadily gone about dismissing the brain sciences with a cold, cynical, and doubtful attitude— as if neuroscience has long overstayed its welcome, and must now be hurried out the door. Noah Hutton offers a response.

Ahead of an art/brain panel discussion this week in Brooklyn, NY, Noah Hutton presents an outline of the current state of the dialogue between the arts and brain sciences, with three major lines of inquiry apparent.

“Subjective Resonance Imaging” was an international group gallery show co-organized by The Beautiful Brain and The Neuro Bureau for the 2013 Human Brain Mapping conference in Seattle, June 16-20, 2013, featuring the work of 12 artists.

A new gallery show in Oxford presents the work of artists affected by neurological conditions, and contemporary art inspired by discoveries in neuroscience. We interviewed the three co-curators of the show about issues in art and neuroscience.

Podcasts

To kick off our new season of The Beautiful Brain Podcast, host Noah Hutton sits down with Carl Schoonover, author of “Portraits of the Mind,” to talk about how we have imaged the brain from antiquity to the present.

In this month’s podcast we proudly present a conversation with the outspoken artist and author Garry Kennard. Kennard, the founder of artandmind.org, and has hosted many conferences and festivals that have brought together leading thinkers in the fields of art and brain research.

In this month’s podcast, Noah Hutton speaks with British artist Andrew Carnie, whose current installation at the GV Art Gallery in London uses slide projections to explore the evolving narrative of the brain.

Language, upright posture, tool-making — these are examples of commonly cited “human-specific” behaviors. But how unique are these behaviors to us clever, hairless apes? New research on a bird from the South Pacific shows that some humbling evolutionary parallels can be lightly drawn between human and nonhuman tool-using behaviors.

The Los Angeles Review of Books has a terrific short review of the new Pixar film Inside Out by Yale Professor of English and American Studies Wai Chee Dimock. Dimock points out that although the film employs the “greatest hits of mind theory,” according to the producer, it leaves thinking out. Berkeley professor of psychology Dacher Keltner, who was consulted on the film, argues that emotions are important for our evolution. The film tries to leave us with empathy for the confusion and anxiety within our own heads and the heads of others, that which thought can never seem to penetrate.